Let me start by saying I like Ruzar - The Life Stone.
It's charming, stylistic, and peaceful. The environments range from cramped, dank dungeon to gorgeous snowfall to otherworldly mineral mines. The sound design is satisfying and helps to breed a laid-back, tranquil adventure.
The game however has its downfalls and, with some love and attention, room for improvement. The following reasons are why I can recommend the game neither to casual nor serious, new nor veteran players:
- Many of the puzzles lack introduction. You'll sometimes be faced with a new puzzle mechanic that you've never seen before, never been told about, and sometimes do not have the tools necessary to solve. Backtrack in vain, scour sparse message boards, or throw the kitchen sink to find a solution.
- Combat balance is lacking. I know the devs have made steps toward remedying this problem - and it's one that exists in most RPG and RPG-adjacent games - but R-TLS strongly encourages you to play a 2h warrior. Despite no formal classes, the dungeon crawler gameplay, very slow level progression, and very little skill tree influence on gameplay makes a 2h warrior by far the easiest build to progress with. The achievements suggest versatile playstyles like stealth assassin, lightning mage, dual wielding ranger - but backstabs are rare, stealth is non-existent, arrows and other ammo are hard to come by in early playthroughs, you're locked to 1 non-ranged weapon with or without a shield and 1 ranged weapon, and instant casts and few spell slots mean you're generally using 1 spell consistently throughout an area. Storage space is NOT shared so using your first character's loot to make subsequent characters easier isn't happening.
- Quests are few and lackluster. I like quests a lot. I'm the RPG player who finishes all the sidequests and starts the level 5 main quest at character level 40. Ruzar does have a handful of quests, and some even have a little depth like avenging trapped spirits, but many are vague with zero direction and a lot of backtracking and nearly, if not all, are kill/fetch quests. They aren't very compelling, the rewards aren't unique, and sometimes I'd return to the Mountains after a delve to find that I have a quest ready for 4 stages ago, go back and stomp through empty dungeons, good luck
- Exploration is painful. The game offers some light puzzle-based secret rooms and a hell of a lot of hidden button secret rooms. Like the puzzles, these hidden buttons aren't exposed to the player in any compelling fashion and you have to know to look for them. None of them are progression relevant, none of them would be obvious to a player not already familiar with the dungeon crawler format, and very few offer much more than a single extra tile and some outleveled equipment that you'll sell.
- *LIGHT SPOILER AHEAD* It's possible, and sometimes very easy, to lock yourself out of completion. As far as I can tell, each playthrough has a finite number of golden keys and a higher number of golden locks. Opening all of them in a single playthrough therefore requires saving keys from previous playthroughs. The final boss's teleport doesn't seem to give any indication that it is indeed the boss room and leaving once you're in is impossible - your options are to reload the last save or finish the game and start the next playthrough.
All that said, I'm still playing the game and slowly creeping towards completion. I imagine 100%ing it will cost upwards of 80 hours and I'm here for the ride. I've learned to enjoy the slower pace and with unchanging, repetitive playthrough cycles it's become a quiet, mechanical game to play while listening to audiobooks or watching video essays.
